I’ve been given some counsel that I should look into doing a podcast here on TentBlogger – something not too technically difficult (from what I understand).

Thoughts? I’ve seen great examples via bloggers like Michael Hyatt (and he also suggested personally that I try it out) and I’m wondering if it’s something that this audience would be interested in?

I’d have to spend some time working on the content and how I’d position it but I thought I’d ping the community here first. Any thoughts? If you have experience podcasting I’d love to hear your suggestions!

Hmm…

Yes, I’ve done it again – I’ve updated my personal landing page. But, this one isn’t as dramatic or “new” as I’ve done in the past – in fact, what I’ve done is consolidated even more of my online properties in an effort to simplify and streamline.

Most notably is the fact that I’ve closed my boutique consulting and contracting website, MilkEngine, in favor of moving all traffic and interest to my John.do landing page (you can read more about the name here). I’ve also used the design. I’ve had that LLC for a long time and although I’ll continue to do contract and consulting jobs here and there and thankfully I’m not at a place where I need to advertise it explicitly any more.

Word-of-mouth and referrals have long-been the greatest marketing channels that I’ve got and it’s not going away.

But more than that I’m finding more interest in digging in to the two startups that I currently manage, the first being 8BIT and the second Action & Influence - these two are my darling babies and the first has grown to a point of having incredible momentum and needs my leadership while the second engages a different set of passions and interests but isn’t altogether different.

Both have incredible potential for impact and they will be how I change the world.

The result, as I’ve already mentioned, is more consolidation and more simple management. This has been, and will continue to be, the theme of my life: Simplifying and focusing on what matters the most and leaving the rest for others to do it better.

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As some of you may have heard late last night I released a small OSX app called Dripps - it’s a super-simple file sharing system that allows you to quickly upload files to a certain directory (if it’s a shared directory for teams) and then given a direct URL link (via Google’s URL Shortener API) to the file for sharing publicly.

So you can share files publicly and privately. The premise was simple: I have been paying for some other applications that do very similar things (like CloudApp, Droplr, and many others) and also paying for a big account via Dropbox and in an effort to save a bit of money I thought I might as well have Dropbox handle the file management and sharing capability!

In addition, I wanted to learn more about XCODE and the Dropbox API and get my feet wet with those development environments. I’ve been known to tinker and experiment so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to build it on-off and on the side, especially since there was little pressure to ship it or even make any money.

It took quite a while actually – about 5 or 6 months. There’s a lot of reasons for the expanded timeline and I may end up sharing the soup-to-nuts process of building my first App Store app at some point. Right now I’m glad it was accepted (it was rejected three times…!) and I can go work on something else!

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I can only speak for myself but I know that I’m not alone when it comes to listening to music while I work – in fact, I’ve written about it a few times before sharing how I loop one song on repeat as my method of keeping things moving.

But the reason this is extremely important to my daily routine and flow is because it helps me pace my work and keep me focused. I’m not that musically talented nor do I really play any instrument well but I appreciate it as well as any normal human can – how I see music though is strictly a means to an end – in other words, I see it as an uncompromisable tool within my productivity toolkit.

Here are three reasons why music is absolutely essential to my personal productivity pattern and why I coach others to find similar tools for their own use:

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As I had mentioned the other day I had traded my 1st generation iPad in for one of the new one – and it was shipped to my door yesterday because there was no way I was going to stand in line for that!

The last few days have been a fantastic test of it’s viability in a number of different settings, especially in terms of blogging both as a professional use-case as well as a novice and from a hobbyist perspective.

I quickly opened up the case to dive inside, restored from backup from iCloud and then began using some of my typical applications as well as some of the new suggested ones that I’ve been hearing about in the past few days.

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I’m always open to trying new systems and new tools to see if they have what it takes to bring value to my overall blogging strategy and global workflow – I’ve mentioned this before specifically about how experimentation is one of the key success strategies that I employ!

So when RevResponse dropped me a line about their RSS to Email tool, a potential Feedburner alternative, I had to take a look, especially since I’ve been using Feedburner forever and I’d love to see someone de-throne one of my current tools in my toolkit!

Of course I had to check it out and instantly I was intrigued because I quickly understood why I and perhaps many other bloggers would make a switch over into this too: Monetization.

You see, this tool not only managers RSS feeds, it also helps you make a bit of cash as well, syndicating your content via email while increasing your subscriber list and advertising smartly with integration with free ebooks, white papers, and magazines that are relevant to the content of your newsletter.

Whoa, that’s pretty slick. Check out this short but comprehensive video explaining the service:

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Here’s a simple truth: The better you become at your distinct craft the more simple your toolkit becomes.

What’s fascinating is that this has been shown to be true of some of the best and most well-known “doers” out there, entrepreneurs, artists, and businessmen and women.

What does this practically mean and look like? It means that there seems to be a direct relationship between the quantity of tools that you use and the quality of your craft – the less you have the better you are.

For example, the amount of applications that I typically use on a day-to-day basis may actually surprise you – I can count them on one hand:

1. Google Apps
2. iAWriter
3. Coda
4. Notebook

It has surprised many people when they ask what I do and what I use to get stuff done and the list isn’t too long. Sure, I use some other apps here and there but these are really my “core” – these are the things that get the job done. In fact, if you were to follow the line of actual physical devices it would really be three:

1. Macbook Air
2. iPhone
3. Notebook

Ta-da!

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Late last night, just after 1:00am, I hit the “Purchase” button on one of the New iPads, representing the 3rd generation. I had teetered between getting one and not getting one more than a few times and had convinced myself that it wasn’t worth it.

But it all changed when I realized that Amazon’s Trade-in program was offering over $300 for the iPad 1 and up to $500 for the iPad 2! Wahhhhhhhhhh?!?

Yes, that’s right. Pretty nuts!

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Looking for a qualified buyer for a sweet domain: WPM.ag!

SOLD! That was quick. Now I can go buy myself some lunch………..!

I don’t usually call out a specific domain that I have for sale (because I have so many of them) but this domain is definitely neat for a number of reasons:

• If you love WordPress than this could be a killer domain name!
• 3-letter domain? Oh my goodness… Yes! Incredible!
• WPM.ag would be obviously short for WordPress Magazine – incredible brand!
• Simple, easy to remember. No-brainer.
• It’s cute. Or at least I think so.

The intention when I purchased it was to start a small (but growing) online and offline magazine featuring WordPress (duh!). I never got around to it, but the right person with the right amount of motivation could take it and do some serious damage.

Let me know if you’re seriously interested. I’m looking for about $500, or best offer. Shoot me one, yeah? Neato.

I did something that I’ve done before this weekend and I decided to mass unfollow everyone on Twitter – all 23,000 or so.

If you’d like to know why I decided to do this then you can head over to Michael Hyatt’s blog post about the same topic and read his justification for it – I agree with him word for word (and he dropped over 100k followers!).

Ok? Done? Great. This post’s purpose is pretty simple: To share the best mass unfollow tool for Twitter that I could find and the solution was quite simple: SocialOomph.com. Sure, it’s not a pretty website (at all) but it’s highly functional and that’s what you need anyways.

Here’s what I did:

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